1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for transferring information utilizing an electron beam and applications thereof.
More particularly, the present invention relates to a method using a plurality of memory units each with a solid-state electron beam source to transfer information between the plurality of memory units, and an information transfer apparatus comprising the plurality of memory units.
Furthermore, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for performing logical calculations, an information shift apparatus, a memory device, and an image forming apparatus, utilizing the method for transferring information.
2. Related Background Art
A conventional memory unit utilizing an electron beam is a so-called BEAMOS memory as described in, for example, Applied Physics Letters, G. W. Ellis et al., Vol. 24, No. 9, 1974, P. 419. In this memory, a write electron beam is incident on a capacitor of a MOS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) structure to accumulate positive holes in an insulating layer, and some of the accumulated positive holes are put out with a read electron beam, thereby reading out information.
In the information read mode, information is partially destroyed, and repetitive read access cannot be performed. In order to perform repetitive read access, rewriting is required. However, in order to obtain necessary information, it takes a long period of time. In addition, the stored information may be lost over a long period of time. Furthermore, when information is to be transferred between the memory units utilizing electron beams, or when a so-called shift register function for shifting information and a serial/parallel information conversion function is to be obtained, the pieces of information must be sequentially read out and written again, thus resulting in time-consuming, cumbersome operations. Therefore, a long operation time is required.
In the field of image processing which has been recently developed and applied in practice, identical calculations between the adjacent pixels must be performed for all pixels. In conventional calculation techniques, information must be read out from an image memory by units of pixels in the same manner as in logical calculations. The calculated results are stored again in the image memory, thus performing time-serial operations which require a long calculation time. Therefore, strong demand has arisen for a method of performing high-speed, parallel processing of all adjacent pixels.
In addition, in high-level two-dimensional parallel processing, logical operations between any two pieces of information in a two-dimensional information matrix are required. Demand has also arisen for a method of performing the above calculations.